10 ms·

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

115 points by kalvin 16y ago

kalvin 16y ago
Things I didn't know (no idea how accurate they are, if anyone has more detail, chime in): On the Enron Corpus: "He bought a copy of the database for $10,000 and made it freely available to academic and corporate researchers. Since then, it has become the foundation of a wealth of new science — and its value has endured, since privacy constraints usually keep large collections of e-mail out of reach. “It’s made a massive difference in the research community,” Dr. McCallum said. The Enron Corpus has led to a better understanding of how language is used and how social networks function, and it has improved efforts to uncover social groups based on e-mail communication." On future law employment: Quantifying the employment impact of these new technologies is difficult. Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent. The computers seem to be good at their new jobs. Mr. Herr, the former chemical company lawyer, used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company’s lawyers did in the 1980s and ’90s. His human colleagues had been only 60 percent accurate, he found. “Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss,” he said.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  It's mainly accurate. My wife works for a major vendor in this sector, and I'm a pre-law student with a hacking background, knowing more about this technology than I can say here. However, discovery is just one part of the legal industry. Lynch's numbers are exaggerated, though his basic points are correct. Don't generalize too much from this.
  - sunchild 16y ago
    Correct. This has little to no effect on transaction or corporate practice. Some of these vendors claim to handle M&A due diligence. Having been through one or two mergers/sales myself, I am convinced that no expert system in the near term will be able to replace humans in that area. Unlike discovery, which is focused on a readily-searchable data set like email, the job of piecing together a company's assets and contract obligations is extremely complex business, where the bottleneck is often the mish-mash of paper records and broken contract management tools, and nuanced judgment calls about critical asset dispositions must be made every few hours over the course of months and months. I'm not saying there isn't an obvious, eventual technology solution to these problems – just that it isn't anywhere near as mature as litigation support, discovery, and patent practice.
stretchwithme 16y ago
“Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.” Overall, I have to disagree. Letting machines do all the mind-numbingly boring work leaves the rest for human beings. And we pay a lot less for the final products, leaving resources for new jobs, which will also have the boring parts automated. Disagree? Hire a hundred people to do all your drudgery. Then pretend you're paying them hardly anything. I submit your life will suck less.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  Yes, I didn't see why such a job - combing through thousands of printed pages to find possibly relevant material - should be preserved, either.
- ippisl 16y ago
  "Over the long run we find things for people to do." The problem with such a prediction is that we have so very little data to base it on. if computers are to replace most of man's intellectual activities, that change compares to the industrial revolution , but it's not a very good comparison , because we will have machines and robots to replace physical labor. It's basicly a prediction by an economist , and we all know how accurate are those.
  - stretchwithme 16y ago
    All we have is history to go on and the fact that new jobs have always replaced old ones. Whenever something is automated, the money no longer spent on salaries are spent on other things, things which people must be paid to provide. Which is why farm automation put 80% of the people out of work and there are still lots of jobs. Except, of course, when bad policy gums up the works.
    - ippisl 16y ago
      Never in history was a time when machines were capable of doing everything a human could do and do it more cheaply. We might be approaching that time , and that makes predictions difficult.
djm 16y ago
I think we can expect much more of this sort of thing. Technology always removes humans from the work force and we now have the right set of resources - reliable, cheap computers and a large enough pool of skilled programmers - to do to office workers with software what we did to farm works with tractors and auto workers with robots.
- gfodor 16y ago
  There is still a big piece missing -- the methods for translating business rules used by these people into workable software is error-prone, cumbersome, and ad-hoc.
  - Unseelie 16y ago
    That really doesn't sound like a huge problem. The method for building robotic arms was full of early errors in robotic arm programs(and likely still is), but the programmers identified those errors and fixed them, over and over again. For that matter, programming in general is error prone. Bugfixing happens. Businesses which can hire ten men to oversee a buggy program rather than twenty men to do the actual work will do so, and over time, the program will get better and need less overseers. Its an iterative process, and one that doesn't need perfect programs to bootstrap.
- fleitz 16y ago
  If the farm analogy is any indication, pretty soon lawyers will receive gov't subsidy not to sue people. I wonder what kind of bands LegalAID 2018 will draw?
- cosmicray 16y ago
  Let me know when they automate picking of watermelons, tomatoes, etc. Not highly paid work, but indispensable to get the produce out of the fields.
  - kovar 16y ago
    Study your history, in particular the effect of Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Tomatos are being genetically engineered to have a consistent size and shape, partly to enable better automated harvesting.
fleitz 16y ago
I've written software to replace this type of thing, in my case it was classifying communications as to whether they were attorney-client privileged or not. It has to be cheaper, it was about a month of my time. And about a week working with a high priced lawyer to write the ruleset and confirm it caught everything and was excluding all the right stuff. With that software they've essentially got their best lawyer going through every piece of communication. It has to be cheaper, I can't imaging paying someone with a law degree to go through all of that. And now their lawyers are freed up to do something more useful.
- sandGorgon 16y ago
  is it possible for you to mention, how you went about doing this ? technology stack, algorithmic approach, etc.
  - fleitz 16y ago
    Tries for text search, that's really the only thing I learned is that if your searching through a body of text for 40,000 odd keyword you need to turn the document in to a trie. But that's something you'd learn as soon as you read any of the research on the topic. It's basically a programming language for text search that's stored in a database. If I had to do it again I'd base if off a parser-generator and use a DSL, possibly using git for versioning. I ended up basically storing an AST in the db and then creating an object for each node in the decision tree. It was written in perl but that was more of a constraint than a choice.
  - kovar 16y ago
    Take a look at the TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) website - http://trec.nist.gov/ http://trec.nist.gov/ . The published papers are very enlightening.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
stretchwithme 16y ago
There are probably all kinds of potential jobs in the real world that are way too expensive to have a human do and that computers are better at or will be soon. Like gold mining. I'm sure there are rivers in Canada that haven't been fully explored. Send in the drones!
regularfry 16y ago
"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson.
wisty 16y ago
I read somewhere that it's easier to spot a lie in written communication than from listening to a tape. People are magnificent at bluffing, if you listen to the tone of their voice, but when you look at the transcript they become a lot more transparent.
MatthewDP 16y ago
This thing reads like a press release... Sponsored post?
- kovar 16y ago
  I know several of the firms quoted pretty well. I don't think they sponsored it, I think they just have very good PR departments.
bane 16y ago
One of the difficulties in the legal analytics space is that there's not much incentive for lawyers to spend less time on a case. In fact it's the opposite, the more billable hours they can charge for their work, the better. Speeding up their process is not necessarily hitting their pain point.
- kovar 16y ago
  It is hitting the client's pain point, though. There is a huge push in the industry to lower costs, and law firms are feeling, though resisting, this push.
- kerben 16y ago
  Consider the firm or lawyer being compensated on a contingency fee basis -- they must cover all the expenses and overhead related to prosecuting the case, including the salaries for attorneys and paralegals working the case -- and if they lose they get nothing. Since their reward for winning the case is fixed, at usually 1/3, reducing the time and cost they expend on a case, particularly during e-discovery (which can consume quite a bit of time and manpower), is both valuable and in their best interests.
  - bane 16y ago
    Any idea how common this is?
    - jakewalker 16y ago
      Very common for plaintiffs lawyers in many types of cases (consumer class action (sort of), personal injury, among many others). Almost impossible to have a contingency fee for a defendant. And often the defendants are the ones with the burden of producing (and first reviewing) a high level of documents.
      - ippisl 16y ago
        In the last few years , there was in the legal industry for fixed-fee arrangements(probably because of the financial crisis). Does a similar business model change happens in the defense part?
kovar 16y ago
One of the things the article doesn't address is how do we determine the accuracy of these tools and processes? Self-serving answer - http://integriography.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/building-virtual-crime-scenes-for-the-ediscovery-world/ http://integriography.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/building-virt... It is a real problem and not one we're trying to create. There was a lot of discussion at Legal Tech this year about the need to determine the accuracy of ediscovery processes, and in particular, review processes.
zephjc 16y ago
I think we are behind schedule for Back to the Future 2's 2015 prediction of the abolition of all lawyers.
sabat 16y ago
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." --William Shakespeare, Henry VI Maybe this is coming true in an unexpected way.
- sabat 16y ago
  Hmm. So either you don't get the not-that-nuanced reference, or you just look for any opportunity to vote people down. I used to take downvotes more seriously -- but less and less so these days.
fredBuddemeyer 16y ago
this technology wont hurt legal employment because it enables so many more lawsuits. every document on earth holds potential tort value that can be exploited now. after discovery its still a manual process to litigate so the number of attorneys should rise.
- kovar 16y ago
  Enhancing the quality of automated review tools will significantly reduce the number of lawyers employed doing sweatshop style review. Just because a technology might enable more lawsuits (which I am not certain is the case here) doesn't mean more lawsuits will be filed. Oftentimes, finding evidence causes parties to settle rather than go to court. Further, the existing courts can only handle so many cases per year. You can't suddenly up the throughput on the court system.
crux_ 16y ago
We're rapidly approaching (have almost certainly passed) the point where it would be feasible for the average worker to do far less than 40 hours a week. Notwithstanding the cultural & structural reasons we can't get there from here, that is. But at some point in the future, most of what we now call "work" will not be done by people. This has the potential to be incredibly liberating, if by then we will have found ways to decouple a persons ability to meet basic economic necessities from their ability to find a job.
bhousel 16y ago
For those that don't know, this is the model by which electronic discovery is generally conducted today: http://edrm.net/ http://edrm.net/ It's over a billion dollar market and there are plenty of enterprisey vendors that have positioned themselves into every box on that EDRM chart. Lawfirms and corporate counsel will happily pay for this stuff because the amounts at stake in litigation are so huge.
- skmurphy 16y ago
  Second place in a market can still allow a company to be profitable and growing. Second place in a lawsuit can impact not only profits and growth but viability.
- kovar 16y ago
  Actually, the EDRM model is only one model, and it is rapidly falling by the wayside. For example, ECA - early case assessment - is becoming a very important part of ediscovery but you can't fit ECA into the EDRM as the EDRM is essentially linear and doesn't allow for loops.
  - bhousel 16y ago
    Wha? EDRM has loops built into it.. I admit that my understanding may be off, but it seems like ECA is just using the same EDRM model and iterating faster upfront. I feel that it's more of a vendor buzzword than a new way of conducting electronic discovery.
    - kovar 16y ago
      The industry is full of buzzwords, hype, and snakeoil, alas. ECA is one example, and I'd argue that the EDRM is another. The EDRM was good a few years ago but hasn't really evolved to reflect current, and developing practices. ECA describes a part of the process that was hard to do in the early days because the tools didn't support the faster iteration upfront. As people realized the value of that iteration, the tools improved and the term gained power and marketing presence. In other words, I agree with you.
jasonostrander 16y ago
I wonder if something like this could help solve the patent troll problem. As I see it, there are two conditions that allow patent trolls to function: 1. The ease of obtaining frivolous patents. 2. The cost of litigating patent disputes exceeds the cost of settling. The software industry has focused primarily on the first point, but if we could reduce the costs of litigating, it may well reduce the financial benefits of being a patent troll. I'm thinking of something like IBM's Watson being used to find prior art, auto-filing court motions, etc. Of course, it all comes down to what some jury in Texas thinks so I'm probably just dreaming.
dougabug 16y ago
Finally, here is a technology I can get with. Most of the web entrepreneurs seem to embrace a "Field of Dreams" breed of business plan: build it and they will come. And when they do come - advertise, upsell, follow, track and slice and dice the hell out of them! Thanks, but no thanks. But saving millions of lawyer hours a year? Realizing substantial savings on significant business costs will always prove valuable. Win for society, win for technology, win for capitalists. While I wouldn't say that lawyers are parasites, reducing the proportion of lawyer cost strikes me as highly positive for the economy.
- kovar 16y ago
  If you literally want to get behind it, let me know ... I can throw in "hold lawyers, SaaS providers, and vendors accountable for the quality of their offerings in a court of law."

115 points by kalvin 16y ago

Things I didn't know (no idea how accurate they are, if anyone has more detail, chime in): On the Enron Corpus: "He bought a copy of the database for $10,000 and made it freely available to academic and corporate researchers. Since then, it has become the foundation of a wealth of new science — and its value has endured, since privacy constraints usually keep large collections of e-mail out of reach. “It’s made a massive difference in the research community,” Dr. McCallum said. The Enron Corpus has led to a better understanding of how language is used and how social networks function, and it has improved efforts to uncover social groups based on e-mail communication." On future law employment: Quantifying the employment impact of these new technologies is difficult. Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent. The computers seem to be good at their new jobs. Mr. Herr, the former chemical company lawyer, used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company’s lawyers did in the 1980s and ’90s. His human colleagues had been only 60 percent accurate, he found. “Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss,” he said.

anigbrowl 16y ago
It's mainly accurate. My wife works for a major vendor in this sector, and I'm a pre-law student with a hacking background, knowing more about this technology than I can say here. However, discovery is just one part of the legal industry. Lynch's numbers are exaggerated, though his basic points are correct. Don't generalize too much from this.
- sunchild 16y ago
  Correct. This has little to no effect on transaction or corporate practice. Some of these vendors claim to handle M&A due diligence. Having been through one or two mergers/sales myself, I am convinced that no expert system in the near term will be able to replace humans in that area. Unlike discovery, which is focused on a readily-searchable data set like email, the job of piecing together a company's assets and contract obligations is extremely complex business, where the bottleneck is often the mish-mash of paper records and broken contract management tools, and nuanced judgment calls about critical asset dispositions must be made every few hours over the course of months and months. I'm not saying there isn't an obvious, eventual technology solution to these problems – just that it isn't anywhere near as mature as litigation support, discovery, and patent practice.

stretchwithme 16y ago

“Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.” Overall, I have to disagree. Letting machines do all the mind-numbingly boring work leaves the rest for human beings. And we pay a lot less for the final products, leaving resources for new jobs, which will also have the boring parts automated. Disagree? Hire a hundred people to do all your drudgery. Then pretend you're paying them hardly anything. I submit your life will suck less.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago
Yes, I didn't see why such a job - combing through thousands of printed pages to find possibly relevant material - should be preserved, either.
ippisl 16y ago
"Over the long run we find things for people to do." The problem with such a prediction is that we have so very little data to base it on. if computers are to replace most of man's intellectual activities, that change compares to the industrial revolution , but it's not a very good comparison , because we will have machines and robots to replace physical labor. It's basicly a prediction by an economist , and we all know how accurate are those.
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  All we have is history to go on and the fact that new jobs have always replaced old ones. Whenever something is automated, the money no longer spent on salaries are spent on other things, things which people must be paid to provide. Which is why farm automation put 80% of the people out of work and there are still lots of jobs. Except, of course, when bad policy gums up the works.
  - ippisl 16y ago
    Never in history was a time when machines were capable of doing everything a human could do and do it more cheaply. We might be approaching that time , and that makes predictions difficult.

djm 16y ago

I think we can expect much more of this sort of thing. Technology always removes humans from the work force and we now have the right set of resources - reliable, cheap computers and a large enough pool of skilled programmers - to do to office workers with software what we did to farm works with tractors and auto workers with robots.

gfodor 16y ago
There is still a big piece missing -- the methods for translating business rules used by these people into workable software is error-prone, cumbersome, and ad-hoc.
- Unseelie 16y ago
  That really doesn't sound like a huge problem. The method for building robotic arms was full of early errors in robotic arm programs(and likely still is), but the programmers identified those errors and fixed them, over and over again. For that matter, programming in general is error prone. Bugfixing happens. Businesses which can hire ten men to oversee a buggy program rather than twenty men to do the actual work will do so, and over time, the program will get better and need less overseers. Its an iterative process, and one that doesn't need perfect programs to bootstrap.
fleitz 16y ago
If the farm analogy is any indication, pretty soon lawyers will receive gov't subsidy not to sue people. I wonder what kind of bands LegalAID 2018 will draw?
cosmicray 16y ago
Let me know when they automate picking of watermelons, tomatoes, etc. Not highly paid work, but indispensable to get the produce out of the fields.
- kovar 16y ago
  Study your history, in particular the effect of Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Tomatos are being genetically engineered to have a consistent size and shape, partly to enable better automated harvesting.

fleitz 16y ago

I've written software to replace this type of thing, in my case it was classifying communications as to whether they were attorney-client privileged or not. It has to be cheaper, it was about a month of my time. And about a week working with a high priced lawyer to write the ruleset and confirm it caught everything and was excluding all the right stuff. With that software they've essentially got their best lawyer going through every piece of communication. It has to be cheaper, I can't imaging paying someone with a law degree to go through all of that. And now their lawyers are freed up to do something more useful.

sandGorgon 16y ago
is it possible for you to mention, how you went about doing this ? technology stack, algorithmic approach, etc.
- fleitz 16y ago
  Tries for text search, that's really the only thing I learned is that if your searching through a body of text for 40,000 odd keyword you need to turn the document in to a trie. But that's something you'd learn as soon as you read any of the research on the topic. It's basically a programming language for text search that's stored in a database. If I had to do it again I'd base if off a parser-generator and use a DSL, possibly using git for versioning. I ended up basically storing an AST in the db and then creating an object for each node in the decision tree. It was written in perl but that was more of a constraint than a choice.
- kovar 16y ago
  Take a look at the TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) website - http://trec.nist.gov/ http://trec.nist.gov/ . The published papers are very enlightening.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

stretchwithme 16y ago

There are probably all kinds of potential jobs in the real world that are way too expensive to have a human do and that computers are better at or will be soon. Like gold mining. I'm sure there are rivers in Canada that haven't been fully explored. Send in the drones!

regularfry 16y ago

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson.

wisty 16y ago

I read somewhere that it's easier to spot a lie in written communication than from listening to a tape. People are magnificent at bluffing, if you listen to the tone of their voice, but when you look at the transcript they become a lot more transparent.

MatthewDP 16y ago

This thing reads like a press release... Sponsored post?

kovar 16y ago
I know several of the firms quoted pretty well. I don't think they sponsored it, I think they just have very good PR departments.

bane 16y ago

One of the difficulties in the legal analytics space is that there's not much incentive for lawyers to spend less time on a case. In fact it's the opposite, the more billable hours they can charge for their work, the better. Speeding up their process is not necessarily hitting their pain point.

kovar 16y ago
It is hitting the client's pain point, though. There is a huge push in the industry to lower costs, and law firms are feeling, though resisting, this push.
kerben 16y ago
Consider the firm or lawyer being compensated on a contingency fee basis -- they must cover all the expenses and overhead related to prosecuting the case, including the salaries for attorneys and paralegals working the case -- and if they lose they get nothing. Since their reward for winning the case is fixed, at usually 1/3, reducing the time and cost they expend on a case, particularly during e-discovery (which can consume quite a bit of time and manpower), is both valuable and in their best interests.
- bane 16y ago
  Any idea how common this is?
  - jakewalker 16y ago
    Very common for plaintiffs lawyers in many types of cases (consumer class action (sort of), personal injury, among many others). Almost impossible to have a contingency fee for a defendant. And often the defendants are the ones with the burden of producing (and first reviewing) a high level of documents.
    - ippisl 16y ago
      In the last few years , there was in the legal industry for fixed-fee arrangements(probably because of the financial crisis). Does a similar business model change happens in the defense part?

kovar 16y ago

One of the things the article doesn't address is how do we determine the accuracy of these tools and processes? Self-serving answer - http://integriography.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/building-virtual-crime-scenes-for-the-ediscovery-world/ http://integriography.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/building-virt... It is a real problem and not one we're trying to create. There was a lot of discussion at Legal Tech this year about the need to determine the accuracy of ediscovery processes, and in particular, review processes.

zephjc 16y ago

I think we are behind schedule for Back to the Future 2's 2015 prediction of the abolition of all lawyers.

sabat 16y ago

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." --William Shakespeare, Henry VI Maybe this is coming true in an unexpected way.

sabat 16y ago
Hmm. So either you don't get the not-that-nuanced reference, or you just look for any opportunity to vote people down. I used to take downvotes more seriously -- but less and less so these days.

fredBuddemeyer 16y ago

this technology wont hurt legal employment because it enables so many more lawsuits. every document on earth holds potential tort value that can be exploited now. after discovery its still a manual process to litigate so the number of attorneys should rise.

kovar 16y ago
Enhancing the quality of automated review tools will significantly reduce the number of lawyers employed doing sweatshop style review. Just because a technology might enable more lawsuits (which I am not certain is the case here) doesn't mean more lawsuits will be filed. Oftentimes, finding evidence causes parties to settle rather than go to court. Further, the existing courts can only handle so many cases per year. You can't suddenly up the throughput on the court system.

crux_ 16y ago

We're rapidly approaching (have almost certainly passed) the point where it would be feasible for the average worker to do far less than 40 hours a week. Notwithstanding the cultural & structural reasons we can't get there from here, that is. But at some point in the future, most of what we now call "work" will not be done by people. This has the potential to be incredibly liberating, if by then we will have found ways to decouple a persons ability to meet basic economic necessities from their ability to find a job.

bhousel 16y ago

For those that don't know, this is the model by which electronic discovery is generally conducted today: http://edrm.net/ http://edrm.net/ It's over a billion dollar market and there are plenty of enterprisey vendors that have positioned themselves into every box on that EDRM chart. Lawfirms and corporate counsel will happily pay for this stuff because the amounts at stake in litigation are so huge.

skmurphy 16y ago
Second place in a market can still allow a company to be profitable and growing. Second place in a lawsuit can impact not only profits and growth but viability.
kovar 16y ago
Actually, the EDRM model is only one model, and it is rapidly falling by the wayside. For example, ECA - early case assessment - is becoming a very important part of ediscovery but you can't fit ECA into the EDRM as the EDRM is essentially linear and doesn't allow for loops.
- bhousel 16y ago
  Wha? EDRM has loops built into it.. I admit that my understanding may be off, but it seems like ECA is just using the same EDRM model and iterating faster upfront. I feel that it's more of a vendor buzzword than a new way of conducting electronic discovery.
  - kovar 16y ago
    The industry is full of buzzwords, hype, and snakeoil, alas. ECA is one example, and I'd argue that the EDRM is another. The EDRM was good a few years ago but hasn't really evolved to reflect current, and developing practices. ECA describes a part of the process that was hard to do in the early days because the tools didn't support the faster iteration upfront. As people realized the value of that iteration, the tools improved and the term gained power and marketing presence. In other words, I agree with you.

jasonostrander 16y ago

I wonder if something like this could help solve the patent troll problem. As I see it, there are two conditions that allow patent trolls to function: 1. The ease of obtaining frivolous patents. 2. The cost of litigating patent disputes exceeds the cost of settling. The software industry has focused primarily on the first point, but if we could reduce the costs of litigating, it may well reduce the financial benefits of being a patent troll. I'm thinking of something like IBM's Watson being used to find prior art, auto-filing court motions, etc. Of course, it all comes down to what some jury in Texas thinks so I'm probably just dreaming.

dougabug 16y ago

Finally, here is a technology I can get with. Most of the web entrepreneurs seem to embrace a "Field of Dreams" breed of business plan: build it and they will come. And when they do come - advertise, upsell, follow, track and slice and dice the hell out of them! Thanks, but no thanks. But saving millions of lawyer hours a year? Realizing substantial savings on significant business costs will always prove valuable. Win for society, win for technology, win for capitalists. While I wouldn't say that lawyers are parasites, reducing the proportion of lawyer cost strikes me as highly positive for the economy.

kovar 16y ago
If you literally want to get behind it, let me know ... I can throw in "hold lawyers, SaaS providers, and vendors accountable for the quality of their offerings in a court of law."